MuDoc FAQ

Note: please feel free to add your questions and answers below!

What does MuDoc mean?

MuDoc stands for "MUltimedia DOCumentation" or "MUsic DOCumentation".

What does MuDoc do?

MuDoc provides a mechanism for collecting music recordings (audio, video) and other forms of music documentation (notations, texts, images), digitally archiving them, and making them available to a broad audience. MuDoc provides basic facilities for restricting use, and for ensuring high quality via a peer review process.

MuDoc is designed to

• allow content (assets) with associated metadata and keywords to be submitted, peer reviewed, and ultimately incorporated into a digital repository
• manage multiple roles, including editor and reviewer roles
• allow construction of asset hierarchies
• allow for searching by metadata or keywords attached to content, and retrieval of content
• enforce digital rights, including conditions prohibiting downloads, or allowing downloads for a fee (e-commerce) to be returned to artists and content providers
• enable annotation of stored information
• enable linking of one object to another
• allow a reposigtory federation (distributed set of repositories, linked through a central hub, or "broker") to appear coherently as a single repository

What are keywords?

• Keywords are named concepts, arranged in a non-hierarchical inclusion relation ('directed acyclic graph'), which are used for submission, search, and role assignments
• Users can submit new keywords, following completion of a peer review process akin to that applied to content submissions.

What is metadata?

Metadata is information attached to content, "data about (content) data". An example of metadata is the title of a submission. MuDoc's standard metadata model is Dublin Core, but other models are possible too.

What are roles?

There are two possible roles beyond ordinary user: "editor" and "reviewer".

• Each keyword may have one or more editors or reviewers associated.
• Editors guide a review process and make a final decision
• Reviewers provide feedback to editors upon request
• Submissions are guided to the most appropriate editor, who then selects the most appropriate reviewers from a list. "Appropriateness" is calculated wholly (for editors) or partly (for reviewers) by the submission's keyword(s).
• The Editor in chief is the editor for the "root" keyword, the universal concept of which all other concepts/keywords are included.

How do I become a reviewer or editor?

Role requests are handled as a kind of submission, though in this case rather than submitting content or a keyword, you are submitting yourself! Therefore role requests are peer reviewed, in the same way that new content or keywords are peer reviewed.